Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown

Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown Paperback – November 18, 2023
by Annie Dawid 

Imagine a community full of rainbow families where everyone comes together in the spirit of equality and fraternal love.

Shy pastor's daughter Marceline and her new husband Jim Jones found Peoples Temple in the face of rampant hostility and aggression in 1950s segregated AmeriKKKa.

They give hope to the poor, the miserable, the alienated and disenfranchised of all colors, and build a commune in the jungle of British Guyana.

But this Eden too has its serpent. One who is also jealous of God, and where he goes, everyone must follow, even to the grave.

About Annie Dawid 

Annie's 6th book, PARADISE UNDONE: A NOVEL OF JONESTOWN, arrived in the world on the 45th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre after a 20-year journey from germination of idea to paperback in hand. Hundreds of publishers rejected it, 17 contest judges placed it as a finalist, and a chance encounter with a new British publisher led to this happy occasion.

Annie makes rugs, plays tennis and Scrabble competitively, and cuddles with her favorite mutt, Dennis, in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of South-Central Colorado. Using the principles of assemblage, she makes custom journals, suitcases and sculptures. Think of Eliot's "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." In her art, she melds fragments together into new wholes.

In the year since the book launch at Owl Books in London, Paradise Undone has received the Colorado Authors League award in Literary Fiction, the Firebird prize for multicultural fiction, and the Literary Titan award for Historical Fiction. Now she's researching her next book, a collection of linking short stories, about other Jonestown characters who deserve to have their stories told, tentatively titled FATHOM THESE EVENTS.

https://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Undone-Jonestown-Annie-Dawid/dp/1916708021